1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a locator beacon, and particularly to a Bluetooth™ or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) locator beacon. The beacon can be located using a mobile computing and communications device running a complementary application.
2. Background Information
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a feature of Bluetooth 4.0 wireless radio technology, aimed at new, principally low-power and low-latency, applications for wireless devices within a short range (up to 50 meters/160 feet). This facilitates a wide range of applications and smaller form factor devices.
One important difference between BLE and Classic Bluetooth is that, to obtain simpler and cheaper radio chipsets, BLE uses only 40 channels, 2 MHz wide, while Classic Bluetooth uses 79 channels, 1 MHz wide. Three of these channels, which are located exactly between the Wireless LAN channels, are used for device discovery and connection setup. These channels (also known as “advertising” channels) are used by the technology to search for other devices or promote its own presence to devices that might be looking to make a connection. In comparison, Classic Bluetooth technology uses 32 channels for the same task. This drastic reduction is one more trick that BLE uses to minimize time on air, so as to reduce power consumption. BLE has to switch “on” for just 0.6 to 1.2 ins to scan for other devices using its three advertising channels. Classic Bluetooth, instead, requires 22.5 ms to scan its 32 channels. The power savings are significant: BLE consumes 10 to 20 times less power than Classic Bluetooth technology to locate other radios.